Building the right thing, building it right, fast

Who I am

My name is Jakub Holy and I’m a software craftsmanship enthusiast and a (mainly JVM-based) developer since ~ 2005, consultant, and occasionally a project manager, working currently with Iterate AS in Norway. More under About and #opinion.

Archive for July, 2012

A brief one due to (thanks to?) holiday and an accompanying surprising lack of enthusiasm for the technical stuff.

Recommended Readings

Microdesign and red flags – why using an “else” or returning a boolean as a success indicator should rise a red flag and make you think what you’re trying to achieve and whether there aren’t better options (often there are – using guard conditions instead of else and throwing an exception or returning a detailed status object instead of a boolean)

Summary: Should you read the book? Yes, the chapter on principles and values is trully enlightening. The book in general contains pearls of wisdom hidden in the mud of “I know that already, man.” I would thus recommend skimming through the book and reading only the pieces matching your level and needs.

The book seems to be targeted a lot at Java beginners (especially the chapter on collections), going into otherwise unnecessary details, yet there are many valuable advises of which some can only be appreciated by somebody with multiple years of professional programming experience. It thus seems to me that the book isn’t a perfect match for anybody but everybody will find there many useful ideas. It would best be split in two.

An experienced developer will already know many of the patterns though it’s perhaps useful to see them named and described explicitly and listed next to each – it helps to be aware and clearer of what you do and why you do it.

I’d absolutely recommend everybody to read the chapter A Theory of Programming, explaining Kent’s style of programming and the underlying key values of communication, simplicity and flexibility as well as the more concrete principles (local consequence, minimize repetition, logic and data together, symmetry, declarative expression, co-locating data and logic having the same rate of change). Also in the rest of the book there are valuable ideas that it would be a pity to miss. I list below some of those that I found particularly interesting.

Situation: You want to get notified when a log entry marked ERROR appears in a log file. You want the corresponding trigger to reset back to the OK state if there are no more errors for 10 minutes. (This post assumes certain familiarity with Zabbix UI.)

When defining a Zabbix (1.8.2) trigger e.g. to inform you that there are errors in a log file, how do you verify that it is correct? As somebody recommended in a forum, you can use a Calculated Item with a similar expression (the syntax is little different from triggers). Contrary to triggers, the value of a calculated item is easy to see and the historical values are stored so you can check how it evolved. If your trigger expression is complex the you can create multiple calculated items, one for each subexpression.